Torchwood started life as a spin-off from Doctor Who, and the two shows have always maintained a fairly tight continuity. But now that Torchwood is a Starz/BBC co-production, that seems to have gone out the window, somewhat.

At the very least, events on both shows have people wondering if there's any way they can still take place in the same universe. Spoilers ahead...

For those of you who've missed it, Torchwood: Miracle Day is about a worldwide event: everybody in the world stops dying, all at once. It was just barely possible that this happened and the Doctor didn't notice, just like he missed the arrival of the 456 in Torchwood: Children of Earth, and the various other potentially world-ending threats in Torchwood and the Sarah Jane Adventures.

But the most recent Torchwood episode pushed that beyond the realm of possibility: it began with a caption that read "Two months later." And one eagle-eyed fan, Stuart Ian Burns, has spotted evidence that this two-month gap begins in March 2011, according to the date stamp on Rex Matheson's phone. Meanwhile, it's been definitively established that two different versions of the Doctor were on Earth in April 2011 — the version that gets shot, and the earlier version that shows up in response to his later self's invitation. Plus it's established that Amy and Rory have been hanging out on Earth for ages before that. So how did none of them notice that humanity had become immortal, and there were death camps and a worldwide economic Depression?

So maybe this is a bit of an alternate universe. Or maybe there's a giant reset button at the end of Miracle Day. Or the events of Miracle Day are a fixed point for the Doctor and he already knows how they turn out, so he's chosen not to intervene. Or this is one of those cases where "2011" is not always "2011," just the same way that the U.N.I.T. stories can take place in 1980, followed by 1977.

Of course, this is a show that also takes place in a world where we've put people on Mars (in the 1970s!) and a duplicate Earth appeared in our skies in 1986, and a huge army of Cybermen appeared worldwide and then fought the Daleks, and the entire planet Earth has been moved from its usual location into a weird null-space by the Daleks, and so on and so forth. Maybe after everything else that's happened on the Doctor Who version of Earth, "the human race becomes immortal" doesn't really rate much comment. [via Feeling Listless]